Today Nintendo shocked the world by revealing brand new hardware… But it’s certainly not the Switch successor we’re all (im)patiently waiting for. Instead, Nintendo did its thing and zagged when we all expected it to zig by announcing Alarmo: a Nintendo Sound Clock that will wake you up with tunes and effects from popular Switch games.
It’s a brand new type of product for Nintendo, but if there’s some itch in the back of your brain telling you you’ve seen this before, it’s because you probably have. And the person that initially presented it to us was none other than the late, great Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.
I’ll take you all the way back to 2014, which was a very different time for Nintendo. It was coming off one of the worst financial years in company history (sorry, Year of Luigi) as it struggled to sell Wii U. At a shareholder’s meeting in 2014, Iwata dropped the first hints of Nintendo’s brand new Quality of Life initiative, teasing the development of “non-wearable technology” focused on health that “is not necessarily something you will use in the living room.”
In October of that same year, Iwata revealed Nintendo’s first Quality of Life product, which it intended to launch in 2016. The product was a non-wearable sleep sensor intended to be placed on a bedside table.
Here’s a description of what Iwata had planned at the time: “Inside the QOL Sensor is a non-contact radio frequency sensor, which measures such things as the movements of your body, breathing and heartbeat, all without physically touching your body. This automatically gathered data will be transmitted to the QOL cloud servers, which will then analyze the data measured by the sensor and visually represent sleep and fatigue results.”
Sound familiar? It’s essentially exactly what Nintendo announced today with Alarmo, nearly exactly 10 years after Iwata originally shared the plans.
But until today, those plans sadly never came to fruition. After Iwata’s tragic passing in 2015, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima announced that the product had been shelved indefinitely, explaining in a statement translated at the time by Wired that “we do not have the conviction that the sleep-and-fatigue-themed [device] can enter the phase of actually becoming a product… We no longer have any plans to release it by the end of March 2016.”
It was only a few years later that Japanese news outlet Nikkei reported that Nintendo’s Quality of Life initiative had been entirely canceled. It was 2018 at that point, and we were all living in a post-Switch, post-Breath of the Wild era, and one of the final remnants of Nintendo’s least successful generation quietly faded away.
Or did it? In 2019, The Pokémon Company revealed Pokémon Sleep, which raised questions about if this was what the Quality of Life initiative had turned into. Nintendo denied these claims, but shockingly confirmed that its own Quality of Life project was still alive and well. In 2020, a patent surfaced for a non-wearable sleep tracking device that looks like an early version of today’s newly-revealed Alarmo, with a description that reads in part: “A Doppler sensor is included in the base device which detects biological information such as respiration and pulse, in addition to the user’s body movement.”
While today’s announcement trailer and Ask the Developer series make no mention of President Iwata or the decade-old launch of the Quality of Life initiative, connecting the dots makes it clear that this project is deeply intertwined with Iwata’s lasting legacy.
Blogroll photo credit: Junko Kimura/Getty Images)
Logan Plant is IGN’s Database Manager, Playlist Editor, and Super Ninfriendo on Nintendo Voice Chat. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.